


the mechanics of love

by revolutionnaire



Category: Galileo (TV Japan)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-07-09
Packaged: 2017-12-18 06:38:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/876749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/revolutionnaire/pseuds/revolutionnaire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He says love is illogical. She says it doesn't matter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the mechanics of love

Utsumi doesn't know when or how Yukawa becomes such a big part of her life, only that he has.

They had always existed in entirely different worlds and probably would have continued to do so, had they never met. They were the sort of people that, under any other circumstance, would never even have gotten acquainted with each other, yet somewhere along the way, unsuspectingly and imperceptibly, she'd been drawn into the physicist's world, or perhaps he had been drawn into hers; or perhaps, unable to resist the pull of each other, they had each gravitated towards the other, caught now in each other’s orbits like the atoms and electrons he loved so much.

She sighs.

She's got to stop thinking in Yukawa metaphors.

It’s accurate enough though-- Utsumi hadn't realised much of her time was spent in his company. She can’t seem to remember what her days were like before Yukawa. Yes, it’s only work-related at first, she tells herself; experience had taught her that the easiest way to reach Yukawa was to see him in person, instead of sitting around and hoping he remembered to check his phone that day.

But before she knows it, she’s dropping in to see him even when she doesn’t need his help. Slowly, their conversations steer steadily away from case particulars and onto everything else, and it’s suddenly about more than just work. She finds herself there in the lab, inexplicably, in the mornings before going to work, for a cup of coffee. Or at the end of a long night shift, when his day is about to begin and hers has just ended, to complain about the stake-out she had to sit through with Yuge. Or when she isn't working at all, because she's worried about him, she says, or because she walked by a cafe and they had the cinnamon buns they both liked, or the day her cousin passes away and she doesn't know how she finds herself knocking on the lab door at three in the morning and she's sorry but can she please stay.

Yukawa doesn't say anything, never questions her presence and why she's there. Wordlessly, he lets her stroll in and out of his lab, like a cat free to come and go and make herself at home in the comfortable periphery of his vision. So sometimes she knocks and sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes she's a babbling mess, and sometimes she sits by herself in stony silence. Sometimes she watches him work, and sometimes she falls asleep on one of the back benches. It doesn’t matter. When he can bring himself to leave his work for a while, he makes them coffee, either ignorant or uncaring of the fact that Utsumi hates instant coffee, in their mugs—his always black, hers always brown. It’s always sour in the way freeze-dried coffee is, and a bit too strong, but Utsumi always accepts it gracefully anyway.

 

 

"I have a question," she starts one day, turning the familiar brown mug over in her hands. "Why did you give me this mug? Why did you choose the brown one?"

"Huh?" he says, sounding mildly annoyed. "What kind of question is that? I just chose it."

“I see,” she hums.

He looks up from his experiment, just to see Utsumi smirk. When he asks her why, she says it's just a hypothesis.

 

 

How exactly Utsumi and Yukawa end up at the front step of her apartment at 10 pm on a Thursday night is a question she can’t quite answer. Something along the lines of an intended stake-out going on for too long and Utsumi getting hungry. Or something like that. Utsumi had always been more of an act now, think later sort of person anyway.

“What was so urgent that we had to talk about it here?” he asks, wrinkling his nose as he peers over her into her apartment.

Utsumi has spent enough time around Yukawa to be used to his bluntness.

“Nothing,” she says, slipping out of her shoes. “It’s just late and we haven’t eaten, and I don’t feel like going to a restaurant.”

He accepts this explanation without any question and follows her in, but not before spending a good half minute or so aligning his shoes perfectly alongside hers.

“So you’re going to cook?”

“Of course. If you don’t mind.”

Yukawa shrugs, which Utsumi takes as a good sign.

Utsumi notices he’s kept his jacket on, and she decides to make him miso soup because it's cold and he looks sort of miserable.

As she bustles around her tiny kitchen gathering her supplies, Yukawa stalks around her living room, examining every nook and cranny in the way he does at crime scenes. Hands clasped politely behind his back to avoid touching anything, he peers curiously at the knick knacks around her home, paying particular attention to the contents of her bookshelves, making little alternating sounds of mild derision and approval.

“Having fun?” she calls to him.

“Interesting,” is the only reply she receives.

Smiling to herself, she puts the stock on the boil and starts to prepare the rest of the ingredients. It’s far from perfect. She has a hard time getting the tofu out of its plastic container, and so she ends up with something approximating tofu mush instead of the neat cubes she'd been aiming for. Still, it smells great; and by the time she’s done, there’s a pillow of miso settling in the middle of the pot like a cloud. She ladles the soup out into a bowl, sprinkles it with haphazardly sliced spring onions, and takes it over to Yukawa, who is apparently done with his examination of her apartment and is now trying to huddle most of his 6 foot frame under the kotatsu.

"Here you go," she says, beaming at him as she sets it down on the table in front of him. “Miso soup.”

The steam wafts into his face and Utsumi gleefully notes the eagerness in his eyes before he catches himself and tries to look unimpressed.

"Doesn't look like miso soup," he says, petulantly. “The tofu is mushy.”

"Hey, don't knock it yet," Utsumi scolds. "Remember my delicious minced beef with sliced peppers? You thought it was going to be terrible but you really loved it, didn't you? Even though it didn't look like the picture in the book."

She deepens her voice in what she thinks is a good mocking approximation of Yukawa's. "Now you're the one being illogical. Just because it doesn't look good means it mustn’t taste good. Tell me, what kind of logic is that?"

Yukawa grunts in feigned annoyance, taking small sips of his soup.

“It’s good, isn’t it?”

Yukawa nods. “Thank you.”

Utsumi beams.

“Come on,” she says, ladling a bowl of soup for herself. “Move over, I’m cold too.”

Yukawa shifts obediently, lifting up the edge of the kotatsu so she can slip in next to him.

 

 

“We need to talk,” she says when they’re done eating, pulling out two empty glasses and the bottle of whiskey she keeps for reasons she had by now forgotten.

“Is that a good idea then?” he asks uncertainly, eyeing the bottle.

It occurs to her, not for the first time that night, that beyond the occasional sake to accompany a meal, she's never seen Yukawa drink before. She wonders idly what sort of drunk he’d be. Maybe would alcohol loosen his tongue and drop his inhibitions, but then again, this was a guy who wore a three-piece suit to the beach. Maybe he was the sort to just drop fast asleep, or even worse, the sort that gets sadder the more they drink. Either way, it was impossible to predict, so she suppresses a giggle at the thought of an inebriated Yukawa, and pours them their first drinks.

She clinks their glasses together perfunctorily, as Yukawa nods in return.

Yukawa uses the tip of his finger to flick the ice in his glass, sending it spinning around the inside. He does it over and over again, almost like a nervous tic.

"Hey, isn't that quite unhygienic?"

"What is?"

"This," she says, jabbing her finger into her glass. "You're the scientist; shouldn't you know how many germs and bacteria live on your hands?"

"Hrmmm," he concedes. "It's not a good habit." He withdraws his finger, puts his glass down and looks at her expectantly.

"Erm, yes, good," she says, stumbling over her words, irritated at herself for allowing him to faze her like this, again, as usual. For the longest time, she had been harbouring a not quite small suspicion that there was something about Yukawa seemed to constantly set her on edge-- not that that was something bad, not at all, it had just been a while since she had let another human unnerve her so. Which, when she thinks about it, is not a bad record for a homicide detective, really.

But it was always little things with Yukawa.

Like the time he noticed she had changed her shampoo; pushing his face all too close to hers and inhaling sharply before drawing back. "I see," he’d said cryptically, while Utsumi unfreezes herself and stills her breathing, too stunned to even ask what on earth he was talking about. He’d said nothing about it until a text, eight hours later.

“So,” he says. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”

“Oh,” Utsumi snaps out of her thoughts, only to remember she didn’t actually have anything she really needed to talk about. She settles for the first thing that comes to her mind, a suitably appropriate topic for the context of their conversation. The context in this case being the rapidly emptying whiskey bottle sitting in front of them.

“You know your whole department thinks we’re dating, right?”

Yukawa says nothing in response, which can only mean that he is, as she suspected, well aware of the rumours. The way his eyes frantically search the room in a determined effort to avoid hers reminds her of a trapped animal looking for an escape.

“I can’t even imagine why they think that,” she prods further. “Did you know about this?”

Yukawa inclines his head ever so slightly.

“And you didn’t bother to correct them?”

“I refuse to waste my time with illogical matters such as that.”

“What?” she feigns offence. “What’s so illogical about dating me?”

“I don’t mean it as an insult,” he continues smoothly. “You have objectively attractive facial features, you’re fit and you’re still in the peak of your youth, and despite your inclination to believe in obviously illogical supernatural phenomena, you’re actually quite smart. All in all, most would consider you a very desirable mate. I don’t think it’s illogical to want to date you.”

She blushes furiously at this. Unorthodox delivery aside, it’s more praise from Yukawa than she’s gotten in the entire time she’s known him. And this talk about her looks and of what, of _dating_ her--

“But I’m talking about this thing you all keep harping on about—this “love” thing. You see, what you call love—“

Utsumi can’t do this.

“Hey, hey, hey. Let’s not talk about this tonight, okay?” she says, shushing him by clinking her glass against his. “Let’s just be happy and normal. Here, cheers!”

Yukawa purses his lips, not happy at being interrupted. But he obliges her, and knocks back his first drink.

 

 

Utsumi drinks enough for her head to feel pleasantly heavy—possibly even a little too much judging by the way her vision is starting to white out at the edges. Somewhere between her fourth and seventh drink, the alcohol has turned her cavalier and she scoots closer to Yukawa, who admirably manages not to look too perturbed. She’s lost track of how much he’s had to drink; not like it matters now, anyway. She moves even closer. Close enough that their arms are flush against each other, close enough to can smell his cologne and hear the breath hitch in his throat.

It occurs to Utsumi how rarely they touch each other. Considering all they’d been through together, they’d somehow managed to maintain an acceptable level of respect for their personal space, with the exception of one or two occasions, of course. She’s not sure why, but Yukawa had always struck her as the sort that wouldn’t like being touched unnecessarily. She’s never asked him about it, but the way his eyes go slightly wild as she slides her body up against his tells her her intuition was right again.

Even with her leaning into him, Yukawa remains perfectly silent and unmoving. Utsumi is still sober enough to see that she’s making him uncomfortable, but drunk enough not to care. Serves him right, she thinks in her jumbled mind. He’d made her uncomfortable plenty of times.

“You know something,” she says out of nowhere, and puts her head against his shoulder, angling her head so she’s looking up at him. He stares straight ahead, as cool and composed as she’s ever seen him. If this is disturbing him, he’s doing a good job of not letting it on.

"When I was in middle school, I adopted this stray cat that used to walk around my neighbourhood. It was really scared of us at first, so all I could do was leave it some food and water and eventually he warmed up enough that I could put a collar on him. Just so people would know he belonged to someone and leave him alone, you know? But then," she pauses to pour herself another drink. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Yukawa frowning disapprovingly. "We had to go away for my grandmother’s funeral. We were going to have to be out in the country for at least a week and all I remember is being so scared to leave and it was all because of that cat. I had worked so hard to get him to trust me, and if I just left like that... What if he didn't understand? What if he didn't come back? What if I never saw him again? Who would feed him? But then I realised, he’d lived for so long before I came along. Of course he’d be fine by himself. The one that would be sad was me."

The thought depresses Utsumi and she takes another swig.

Yukawa looks mildly startled at how emotional she's getting. He sheepishly tries to nudge her drink away from her but Utsumi bats his hand away and downs the rest of it, almost out of spite. The poor man, she thinks sluggishly. How many times has he been in situations like this? Alone with a drunk girl? Close to zero, she’d imagine.

"So what I'm saying is, if I were to leave to go away for a while, would you forget me?"

The question seems to take him by surprise. There's a long, almost awkward silence as she stares brazenly at him, emboldened by the alcohol.

"Don't be ridiculous," he says finally, looking away and readjusting his glasses. "Humans are not cats."

Utsumi smiles wistfully into the empty glass.

"I'm glad."

“I’m sure you would be fine on your own though,” she says quietly. She reaches out for the bottle, but Yukawa’s hand shoots out, lightning-quick, and grabs her wrist. The sight of his large hand wrapped around her small wrist is strangely compelling, and she finds herself unable to look away. Firmly but gently, he places her hand back into her lap. When he’s satisfied that her hand is sufficiently far away from the alcohol, he relaxes his grip on her but keeps his fingers curled lightly around her wrist.

Yukawa’s hand is impossibly warm, and so are the long slender fingers resting feather-light around her wrist and Utsumi panics for a moment; her heart is racing so hard and fast, and what if Yukawa could feel the crazy staccato of her pulse under his fingers? She tries to pull away, but it only makes Yukawa tighten his grip again.

“I’m not going to get another drink, jeez,” she somehow manages to protest.

He lets her wrist go, a little reluctantly.

“Sorry,” he says, stiffly.

Utsumi sniffs. She gets up with the intention of clearing away their glasses, but the moment she moves, the world pitches and spins on its axis.

Yukawa reaches out immediately to steady her, reaching an arm around her shoulders. Instinctively, she freezes and sits back down heavily, holding her breath the way she did as a child when a wild sparrow landed on her and could not bring herself to breathe for fear of scaring it away. Yukawa’s arm is snug around her shoulders and for a moment, Utsumi thinks he is going to push her away but he doesn’t.

She’s not sure how much he’s had to drink; he looks perfectly fine, but judging by the now depleted bottle, he’s had to have had some to drink, at least. But if alcohol was supposed to lower inhibitions, it seems to have the opposite effect on Yukawa. He looks awkward, uncertain, his arm around her stiff and uncomfortable. There’s an experimental quality to the way he moves, like he isn’t quite sure what to do with himself. Utsumi’s never seen him like this, so unnerved and so unlike the usual Yukawa she knows. It’s fascinating.

Yukawa looks at her for a long moment. His eyes have glazed over with that faraway look she’s noticed he usually gets when they’re out on a case or when he’s figuring out a particularly hard problem, computations and calculations whizzing in his head.

He cocks his head to the side, and regards her curiously. Under usual circumstances, she’d probably find it more than a little disconcerting. It’s never easy, being under Yukawa’s intense stare; not when he had that way of fixing his eyes on her that made her feel like he was looking straight into her, past all her defences and right into the secrets and fears and hopes she kept hidden away. But tonight she’s five or so drinks down, she meets his gaze equally with what she’s sure is a stupid grin on her face. She stares right back and studies him carefully, appreciating not for the first time the fine set of features in his face; the planes of his cheeks and the angle of his jaw as it curves into his neck. Her eyes drift down to his lips and she allows her gaze to linger there for longer than she would normally have dared.

Her vision shifts back into focus for a moment and she realises for the first time how close their faces are. Someone leans in – whether it’s him or herself, she can’t be sure – and there’s what she thinks is the light press of Yukawa’s lips against her own. It’s nothing more than the slightest hint of pressure; more of a touch than a kiss, but it doesn’t stop Utsumi’s nerves from reacting like they’ve been electrocuted, setting her skin ablaze and her heart nearly pounding out of her chest.

Her alcohol-dulled mind scrabbles for a hold on the situation. She’s kissing him. He’s kissing her? She’s honestly never thought about him this way. No, that’s a lie. It was impossible not to, not after all she’d been through with him. Eccentric professor or not, there was no denying that Yukawa still had a magnetic, forceful quality to him that Utsumi, to her frustration, had always found so intriguing.

She’s just about to reach a hand out to touch him, Yukawa pulls back abruptly, sitting up straight and blinking as though coming out of a trance.

He straightens his jacket, runs a hand through his hair.

“Excuse me,” he says perfunctorily, as if he’s just accidentally stepped on her foot. “I shouldn’t be doing this.”

Utsumi opens her mouth to protest.

“You shouldn’t be doing this,” he says to her, eyes narrowing, before she can even begin to formulate words in her head.

He gets up and disappears into the kitchen. From the living room, Utsumi can hear him rummaging through drawers. There’s the sound of a glass being filled at the sink, and Yukawa emerges. He places the glass of water and a foil strip of pills on the table in front of her. She looks up at him wordlessly.

“Painkillers. Take one with the water and go to sleep. I’m going now,” he says, as though giving instructions in the lab. And with that, he turns on his heel and leaves.

Utsumi stares after him in shock.

 

 

She wakes up on the couch the next morning, alone, and her head feeling like it had spent most of the night trapped under a steam roller.

As she squints at the unfinished glass of water on the coffee table in front of her, the memories come back to her and she buries her face in her pillow.

 

 

Yukawa doesn't care about her emotions, he’d told her that much. Her feelings are irrelevant, he’d said, and she gets that. To some extent, she understands. She can't imagine that many others would be so tolerant of being told that their feelings (and possibly by extension, themselves) were essentially of zero relevance to him, but she really doesn't hold it against him. Years in the police force had taught her that the feelings of another person factored into one’s decisions much less than most people would like to believe.

Or at least, that’s what she tried to tell herself.

The troublesome truth was simply that the more time she spent with Yukawa, the more it upset her, instead of the opposite. By now, she is more than aware of how agitated she gets at any reminder that Yukawa was not subject to the emotions and feelings of others, and of the annoyance she feels at his belief that anything not dictated by logic somehow warranted less attention than the alternative.

And to be honest, it wasn’t Yukawa’s little idiosyncracies that annoyed her. She couldn’t care less that Yukawa thought that small talk was a complete waste of time. It didn’t matter that he thought celebrating birthdays were a completely arbitrary and pointless tradition. What did matter – and bothered her far more than she’s comfortable admitting –was his self-proclaimed disinterest in human feelings and motivations.

Suddenly it all clicks. It all makes sense-- why Yukawa infuriated her, why he constantly set her on edge, why all his talk of logic frustrated her more than she could explain.

Utsumi realises, with a hint of dread, that it wasn’t so much his constant and adamant rubbishing of her feelings that upset her; it was the fact that his doing so meant that he would almost certainly never reciprocate them.

 

 

Utsumi makes a determined attempt to avoid Yukawa in the days that follow. She’s known him long enough to not be surprised when he notices. On the sixth consecutive day of zero contact, her phone goes off with text messages three times in an hour, precisely twenty minutes apart. Knowing Yukawa, he must have done more of his weird calculations and timed his messages to coincide with the times a person was statistically most likely to check their phones, thus maximising the probability that Utsumi would read his messages or something ridiculous like that.

It works.

She cracks her phone open and grimaces when reads the text from Yukawa.

_You’re not answering your phone. Are you okay?_

She grits her teeth against the wave of guilt and slams her phone shut.

 

 

Utsumi’s streak of staying away from Associate Professor Yukawa Manabu is broken finally, after a successful one and a half weeks, when she realises she needs him to sign off on a few witness statement sheets before she can finish up the paperwork on the last case they worked together. That had been a good two months ago, and the report was due within the week so Utsumi doesn’t have much of a choice. She really needs those damn statements signed.

Cursing her luck, she snatches the papers, shoves them in her bag with a groan and heads off towards Teito University. On her way there, it occurs to her that she probably could have asked Yuge to do this in her stead, but that would have just opened up a whole can of questions she wasn’t quite in the mood to answer.

When she reaches the lab, she’s almost thankful that Yukawa isn’t around. She’s not quite yet prepared to face him just yet. She walks in to find three of his students in the middle of what looks like yet another experiment set-up.

“You’re welcome to wait here,” Taniguchi says accommodatingly, clearing a space for her on one of the back benches without even being asked. “He said he’d be back soon. Coffee?”

“No, that’s alright. I just need him to sign a few papers.” she says, with a good mind to just leave them on his desk and come back to collect them after her shift. “Sorry to disturb you.”

“Not at all! Even Yukawa-sensei doesn’t mind.” Taniguchi says, not even bothering to hide the look of glee on her face.

“That’s true,” agrees Murase. “And to be honest, we’re actually really glad you’re here. Yukawa-sensei has been a bit… weird the past week. Well, weirder than usual anyhow.”

“Weird?” Utsumi echoes disbelievingly. It couldn’t possibly be her fault, could it?

“Mm. He’s been pretty distant. Yesterday I made a huge miscalculation on the calibration of the electron spectrometer and he didn’t even notice. Jeez, I was relieved, but it really isn’t like him to miss something like that, you know?”

“And he’s been late to all of his lectures too,” Mori chimes in. “And he keeps looking at his phone—approximately once every twenty minutes. We counted.” They nod at each other in agreement.

“Come to think of it, you haven’t been around lately, Utsumi. Is everything alright?”

“Eh?” Utsumi is taken aback. Goddamn science students. Trust them to notice. “We’re fine! I mean, I’m fine! Just been busy, that’s all.” She waves the papers in the air for emphasis.The students don’t look convinced.

“Anyway, when you see Yukawa, you should ask him if he’s okay. We’re worried about him.”

“Ah,” she says uncertainly. “But I don’t think he’ll tell me anything much. You know him. Why can’t you guys ask him? He’s your professor after all.”

“But he’s different with you,” insists Taniguchi.

“Huh? Why would you say that?” Utsumi is pretty sure of what they’re going to say in reply, but she decides to keep up the whole naïve, ignorant front. Anything less, and they’d be all over her like vultures. Yukawa’s students, for whatever reason, had always been more than a little interested in their professor’s personal life-- especially when it involved her.

As expected, they jump on the opportunity.

“He helps you a lot, even though he doesn’t really get anything from helping the police,” Murase says eagerly.

Utsumi remains silent, but it's true, she supposes. For all his talk of logic and reason, Yukawa was a contradiction. He definitely behaved in ways that, in another human being, would approximate some degree of care-- despite his continual insistence on the contrary. As reluctant as she is to admit it now, Yukawa had helped her a lot in the past year, probably more than was necessary-- with cases and more. Yukawa, for all his supposed indifference towards human feelings, seemed to have a remarkably keen sense of her feelings, noticing when she’s upset or more stressed than usual.

“And he spends so much time with you,” Taniguchi gushes, wide-eyed, her experiment long-forgotten.

“That’s true; he doesn't do that for anyone else. Just ask Kuribayashi-san, he's been here the longest.” Mori grins.

A strangled groan comes from somewhere on the upper level of the lab.

"Isn't it true, Kuribayashi-san?” Mori looks up at Kuribayashi, who is hidden behind a stack of paperwork. “When has Yukawa-sensei ever spent this much time with one person? Except you, I mean."

Kuribayashi turns bright red at this remark and hisses at them. He glares at Utsumi.

"Do you realise since you started poking your nose around here that Professor Yukawa has only published three papers?"

The grad students, at least, have the decency to look somewhat guilty.

 

 

The moment Yukawa gets back to the lab, the students swiftly make a synchronised exit, conveniently dragging Kuribayashi out with them. Yukawa raises a bemused eyebrow at his students’ behaviour but says nothing, turning his attention to Utsumi. His expression grows serious.

“You’ve been avoiding me.”

Utsumi looks away guiltily. She holds the papers out to him.

“I need you to sign these, please.”

Yukawa frowns, narrowing his eyes a little as he recalculates in his head. “But if you really wanted to avoid me, you could have just left those papers here while I was gone. Since you waited until I got back, I can only assume that you want to talk to me about something else.”

Damn it.

“Am I right?” His voice is calm, but there’s a dangerous tone of impatience lurking under it, threatening to cut through the surface.

There was no point in trying to evade Yukawa any further, so she gets straight to the point.

“I’m sorry for what happened that night.”

He raises a hand, as though to wave it off, but Utsumi cuts him off before he can.

“But you’re right, I did want to talk about it.”

“I thought you might,” he says, irritatingly smug. “But you don’t have to apologise. It was bound to happen.”

Whatever Utsumi had planned to say next dies on her lips as she processes what Yukawa has just said. Her hands go cold and she clenches them into fists.

“What do you mean,” she says through gritted teeth, nearly trembling with the effort to keep her voice low and level. “It was bound to happen?”

Yukawa looks unperturbed. “I believe I’ve told you about the effect of alcohol on the brain, but if you’ve forgotten, I suppose I have the time to go over it with you again.”

“What do you mean?” she demands again. “What are you talking about? This isn’t about the alcohol.”

Yukawa furrows his brow at her. “Not about the alcohol? Then what—” His eyes widen as he puts the pieces together in his head. He’s figured it out. “Oh.”

_Oh._

Utsumi really doesn’t know how he’s going to react.

He looks mildly surprised, but in true Yukawa fashion, recovers swiftly. He starts to count a list off his fingers. “The frequency of exposure to the stimulus. The ratio of neurotransmitters in the brain. Physical attraction. Shared novel experiences. Touch. Differences in the major histocompatibility complex. All of these play a part in turning a previously indifferent stimulus into the object of one’s affection.”  
Yukawa smirks at the blank look on Utsumi’s face.

“The experience of liking something is just the effect of dopamine on the receptors in the frontal lobe of the brain,” he says, matter-of-factly.

As Yukawa explains the neurobiology and biochemistry underpinning the process of falling in love, Utsumi fiddles uncomfortably next to him, the memory of that night still all too clear in her mind. She refuses to believe it—that everything she felt then, and all the months before that could be chalked up to some microscopic molecule with a name she couldn’t even pronounce.

Yukawa laughs softly to himself. “The human body really is like a machine. You press a few buttons – input – and these systems turn on to create the intended reactions. And these reactions – the output – are what you humans classify as love.”

“So you see,” he continues. “While the mechanisms behind falling in love make logical sense from a mechanistic point of view, the true reasons for acting on them are truly illogical.”

“Even so, even if you say it’s illogical to love someone, I don’t think it’s really a bad thing,” Utsumi says slowly, mindful of the stubborn jut of her chin.

“No, but I’m saying you people overvalue what is nothing more than a mild chemical imbalance in your brain. There’s really nothing special about it; it’s not that hard to trigger a dopamine surge.”

"Well, it’s not like reason and logic can solve everything, you know,” she continues, basking in the small rush of pleasure at the look of indignation on Yukawa’s face. “There are some things in life that just aren't logical, and you can't keep going on and not bothering with these things just because they don’t seem rational to you! Irrational or not, those things may still mean a lot to someone else."

She’s growing impatient, angry, and she knows Yukawa can tell. Her growing emotions, her rising voice—all this was just more reason for him to disregard and discredit everything she was saying, but even if she could control her temper, she’s long past the point of caring.

"Oh,” he says, frustratingly calm where she is not. “Like what?"

"Like... like…," she cringes inwardly, hesitant to dredge up that old memory again. "Like the bomb," she finishes quietly. It’s still hard for her to talk about the events on that Christmas Eve night. "You remember. When it came down to it, choosing which wire to cut-- it was a purely irrational choice, wasn’t it? You had no way of making a logical decision; you cut the pink wire because I said I liked pink. And there's no logical reason why I like pink."

Or why I like you, she thinks bitterly.

"It was totally random, wasn’t it?” Utsumi presses on. “If my favourite colour had been blue instead, or red, or black, we both wouldn't be sitting here today."

Yukawa takes a moment to ponder this. "Ah, I see," he says, his brow unfurrowing and a hint of a smile starting at the corners of his mouth. "Buridan's ass."

"What??"

"It’s quite interesting,” he says, unfettered, as though they were having a purely intellectual discussion about experimental theories and hypotheses and not matters of the human heart. He takes a sip of coffee. “It’s a philosophical concept-- an illustration of the paradox of free will. Let's say there is a rational donkey that is starving to death. The donkey is located equidistant from two identical piles of hay. But because the donkey is a purely rational creature, it cannot make the decision to choose which pile of hay to eat, since there is no rational reason to pick one over the other. And because it can’t decide, the donkey starves to death."

Utsumi stares unbelievingly at him. “That’s really… stupid.”

"It’s not a true story, only an allegory to illustrate a point. It’s the same point you’re trying to make—that there are some decisions in life that cannot be made based on logic. And so that's why you asked me the question about your coffee mug." Yukawa manages a grin. “Remarkable. Maybe you are developing a hang for logical argument after all.”

She nods at him, pointedly choosing to ignore his last remark. "Yes, exactly. What I was saying was that logic isn’t and can’t be everything. Sometimes all you have are your feelings. And anyway, is logic really so much better?"

Yukawa looks like he's been slapped across the face.

"Of course it is. Feelings and emotions have led people to do terrible things," he snaps, scowling. Ironically, it’s the most emotional he’s looked all evening.

"True, but it’s not all bad. If all you cared about was logic, you couldn’t care about another person, right?”

She looks to him for confirmation and he gives her the barest of nods.

“Right. You wouldn’t because it’s illogical to care wholly about someone other than yourself. And of course logic says it’s ridiculous to risk your life for someone else, but- but you--"

"But I what?" Yukawa’s voice, lower now and more controlled, has taken on a darkly challenging tone.

"You did,” Utsumi says. She’s entirely aware that Yukawa is glowering at her, but she’s beyond the point of no return now, so she grits her teeth and presses on. “You say you don't care, but I think that you do."

“Oh?” he breathes.

"I think you care about me," she says, barely a whisper.

Yukawa says nothing.

She digs deep, steels herself and finds her voice. “You must, because risked your life to save me-- you could have run and saved yourself and let the bomb kill me but you didn’t. You stayed. You were ready to die so I wouldn’t. That was illogical, to me. I’m going to die one day anyway, maybe tomorrow, maybe next year, maybe twenty years from now. Logically, it shouldn’t matter when I die because… I’m going to die. So why didn’t you let me die that night? You said yourself you didn’t want me to. But by your reasoning, isn’t it illogical to be sad about something that’s going to happen anyway, and to risk your life for something that’s going to happen anyway?”

She can tell from the way his jaw works – just the faintest tense and flex of the muscles beneath the skin there - that her words have gotten to him more than he’d like to let on.

He doesn’t bother with an answer, and Utsumi hates herself for feeling relief that it isn’t an outright denial. And there it is, hissing and fizzing in the pit of her stomach and turning her blood red-hot, that same old snarl of anger and frustration building up in her again. When did she become so pathetic?

“Forget it,” she says. She gives up. “I’m going.”

Yukawa doesn't stop her and she lets the door slam shut a little louder than necessary when she leaves.

 

 

It’s raining when she finally leaves the station, three hours after her shift was supposed to end. Utsumi’s gotten used to this part of police work, but it still leaves her bone-tired, too drained to even bother with an umbrella as she makes her way to her car in the rain.

She’s too busy fumbling in her purse for her car keys (she really should have done this while she was still under cover, she thinks belatedly) to realise that Yukawa is there in her car, sitting comfortably in the passenger seat.

She gasps. The bastard broke into her car.

“Your question yesterday,” he says when she’s finally calmed her nerves enough to let herself in, not bothering with greetings or explanations. “I came to answer it.”

Utsumi remains resolutely silent.

"Adaptation," he says, simply. Utsumi grimaces; although she’s largely gotten used to him dropping obscure science terms and jargon and looking at her like he expects her to understand, it’s still annoying when he catches her in the wrong mood. She leans back in her seat and folds her arms, waiting for him to explain.

"So this is my new reality. Human beings adapt-- in other words, we get used to things."

"And you got used to me."

"Yes. Any change in this system would disrupt me greatly.”

"But if humans lose things, won't they adapt to that as well?"

“Yes, but I’d rather not.”

Utsumi is tired.

It’s a different sort of tiredness too; she sighs deeply, like she can exhale it out of her somehow, this crushing grey exhaustion. She feels drained, like she’s been climbing uphill all this while with no end in sight and now she’s completely worn out. It was hopeless to think that someone like Yukawa could change; and it irritates her how stupid and naïve she had been to think that she could make him.

“Whatever you say. It doesn’t really matter,” she says, and pretends not to notice that Yukawa looks mildly hurt. “I’ll send you back to the lab.”

 

 

Yukawa is pensive the entire drive back. He sits stock still, fingers steepled gently in his lap and his jaw clenched tight. Utsumi makes no attempt at conversation, instead choosing to fix her eyes firmly on the stretch of road in front of her. She channels all her energy to getting them to the lab as soon as possible. She’s tired. She wants to go home. Get him out of her car, out of her sight, and go home where she can be alone.

“Utsumi,” he says abruptly, breaking the silence.

When he speaks, it is with a tone so clipped and deliberate, that Utsumi snaps to attention despite herself. The degree of thought he put into choosing his words is evident in the carefully measured cadence of his speech. “What I said earlier-- I was not being truthful,” he says.

She tries her own voice, but it doesn’t come. Her mouth is dry, her throat tight from disuse.

Yukawa appears to deflate at her silence, the tension going out of his shoulders as they slump, ever so slightly.

As she pulls up to the front gate of the university, Yukawa unbuckles his seat belt and turns to her, almost imploringly.

“Utsumi,” he says again, the syllables of her name catching painfully on the desperation in his voice. She has to fight every urge in her body not to turn and look at him. “Will you come down and talk with me?”

 

 

Apprehension builds, sick and cold, in the centre of her chest as they make their way down the corridor leading to the lab. Yukawa leads the way, striding a good few paces in front of her. She creeps in as tentatively and unobtrusively as she can. She’s not sure why she feels so nervous, but she chalks it up to her intuition. There’s a suffocating tightness in the air; she can feel it bristling and sparking across her skin, taking the breath out of her lungs.

Yukawa stops first to make coffee, the slight tremor in his hands as he reaches for the kettle betraying his outward calmness. When he turns around to face her, it catches Utsumi by surprise, how agitated he looks. Yukawa looks like he’s been through a war, his face drawn and tight around his eyes, frustration written into the tired lines of his face. To her surprise, Yukawa takes his coffee over to the beaten leather couch in the corner of the lab and sits down heavily. He’s slumped in on himself, nothing left of the usual commanding presence she had come to associate him with.

“It’s true,” he says finally, his voice strangled with something she can’t quite put her finger on. “Everything you said that night. I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time now. It’s been on my mind since… since Ishigami.”

“Ishigami?” she repeats dumbly.

“You remember the case,” he states, quietly.

Of course she does. She couldn't forget it if she tried. She remembers it all too well; she remembers in particular detail the subsequent fallout, and how badly it had affected Yukawa. The day he’d told her the truth about the murder had been the first time he’d opened up to her without her having to drag it out of him. She remembers how, when it was all over, he had cried for the loss of a brilliant mind, for the loss of a friend. What a shame, he’d said, that it had to be wasted on something like this. She had never seen him so emotionally distraught, had never even thought him capable of it, but looking at him now, it is clear that the memories of the case still hurt him.

“I remember,” she says, unable to meet his eyes.

“When it was all over, I spoke to Ishigami,” he says. A flash of pain crosses his face and he stops to take a minute to breathe, regaining some semblance of his composure. “I didn’t understand what he was saying at the time, but I think I do now.”

Utsumi doesn’t understand, doesn’t have the slightest idea what Yukawa could be talking about.

He moves over a bit, signalling for her to sit down.

She obliges, trying her best to keep a careful distance between the both of them but it’s a rather small couch. Next to him, Utsumi is acutely aware that he's shaking, that he's more upset than she's ever seen him. She doesn’t know what to say; it’s disconcerting and a little scary to see him like this, with the way the sadness seems to radiate off him.

So she reaches out a hand and puts it – gently, carefully, warily - on his.

He looks at her, surprised, but doesn’t pull away. There’s a softness in his eyes she’s only ever seen a few times before.

“I used to think it was illogical to live your life for someone else, to give your life for someone else. I always lived largely for myself, because it was illogical and impractical to try to please everyone else, or to be held accountable to anyone but yourself. So I lived my life not caring what anyone else thought of me, or how anyone else felt. Feelings are just that, right? Just feelings?”

Utsumi knows better than to protest, not when he’s like this.

“But for that reason exactly, Ishigami felt sorry for me. I thought what he did was a waste, but he obviously believed that there could be no better use of a human mind than that. That the most noble and valiant and worthwhile way to spend his life-- was to protect the one he loved. He thought it was sad that I had never known that.”

He’s growing frustrated, the cultivated calm exterior rapidly disintegrating as he gesticulates wildly as he speaks. Utsumi remains quiet and lets him talk.

“He pitied me.” Yukawa laughs bitterly, shaking his head in disbelief. “He’s going to spend the rest of his life in jail, yet he thinks I’m the one to be pitied in this case.” The look on his face makes Utsumi think for a second that Yukawa agrees with him.

“I didn’t understand it at first. For the longest time, no matter how much I tried, I just couldn’t see things the way he did. But then, I thought about it, and the truth is – like what you said that night – the truth is, I do.”

He fixes his gaze on her, looks her straight on in her eyes. He looks agitated, and Utsumi cringes. Not exactly the best reaction to follow a confession like that.

"I can't explain it either," he says, looking more and more forlorn. "Not at all. But everything you said—you were right. I sat down and analysed my feelings and actions and I could only arrive at one conclusion.”

Yukawa takes a sip from his mug,

“That I cared about you.”

“How you felt, if you were in pain—even when I tried not to, I would think about it and it would bother me. I realised it that one time I dragged you into the case with Murase’s missing brother-in-law. You remember. It wasn’t hard for me to deduce that it was really affecting you negatively, but what surprised me was that I felt bad too. I was the one who got you involved, which meant the pain you were in was a direct result of my actions. That is to say, it was my fault."

He looks up at her now.

“I’m sorry.”

His voice sounds like nothing she’s ever heard before; broken and exhausted, and it makes Utsumi suspect the apology wasn’t just in regards to that awful case.

He rotates his hand under hers so they are palm to palm, his fingers curling lightly against hers. They spend a long moment, just sitting like that in each other’s presence. _Like permanent moons in each other’s night skies_. The phrase comes back to her now unbidden, something Yukawa had said one night in an uncharacteristic moment of sentimentality in the middle of a spiel about astronomy. It had struck her then, as it does now, as a strangely beautiful thing to come out of the physicist’s mouth. She smiles at this memory, looking down at their hands and then back up to Yukawa.

He’s looking at her intently again, staring her down—whether to intimidate or to reassure, Utsumi really can’t tell. Yukawa closes the distance between them without warning, just as she’s trying to figure it out, and now he’s looming in the forefront of her vision, impossibly and dangerously close. Utsumi feels the breath catch in her throat, the familiar quickening of her pulse in response to him. She suddenly becomes aware that he’s pushing at her, leaning his weight against her, and Utsumi gets the hint. She lets her body give under the weight of his until she’s stretched out on the seat of the couch with him hovering over her. As she ventures a quick look up at him, his face arranged in quizzical contemplation, she wonders for a split-second if this is part of some strange new experiment he’s concocted.

All thoughts of experiments and the like are summarily extinguished when he dips his head down and kisses her. Utsumi’s lips part in shock, breathing out a puff of hot air against his, and he lets loose a low, rumbling sound, something like a growl or a moan and utterly unlike anything she ever thought could come from the depths of him. She responds in kind, instinctively arching her body up against his and wrapping her arms around his broad shoulders.

Yukawa moves above her, blanketing her body with his considerably larger frame. Her hips jolt upwards to meet his when he tentatively puts his lips to the skin of her neck, drawing a little chuckle from him. She rolls her eyes at him, but her fingers find themselves digging deeper into his back.

“You’re really strange,” she manages to gasp. She feels his lips curl in a smile against her own and it sends her head reeling, her heart doing odd little flips and turns in her chest. Utsumi runs her hands up along his back, past the knotted sinew of his shoulders and the strong, proud neck until her fingers find fixture in his hair, grabbing and fisting until he’s moving against her the way she wants him to. It’s almost too much for Utsumi, an overload of information and sensations and even as she moans and gasps Yukawa’s name, her thoughts are racing a million times faster than she can even begin to process and--

Yukawa breaks the kiss and smiles at her, just a few painful centimetres away from her burning lips. She manages a small smile back, but her head’s spinning; she still hasn’t gotten used to seeing him in this new light.

He sits back up, and Utsumi freezes in fear, remembering the last time he had pulled away like that.

“Let’s go back to your place.”

“Why?” is all she manages, through widened eyes and a pounding heart.

“I want more of your miso soup.”

She laughs, heartily and unabashed, until her sides ache and her breath comes in little gasps. Utsumi lets the laughter bubble out of her, washing away the fear and the doubt and the trepidation that had been building up inside her for so long. Yukawa frowns and shakes his head at her in exasperation, but there’s fondness and affection in the way the corner of his eyes crinkle.

So maybe Yukawa was right. There’s no logic or reason behind love, no mathematical formula with its comforting constants and variables. You couldn’t quantify love, or assign it a universal value, or map out the logic of it. But she was right too.

It didn’t make it any less important.


End file.
